


my missing puzzle piece

by Lauren (notalwaysweak)



Series: Four-Color Love (A Comic Book Romance) [9]
Category: The Big Bang Theory (TV)
Genre: Community: trope_bingo, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-23
Updated: 2014-03-23
Packaged: 2018-01-16 17:24:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1355632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notalwaysweak/pseuds/Lauren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stuart and Raj take their relationship to the next step: making it Facebook official. Familial reactions ensue. Written a) for Amber's Tumblr prompt and b) for Trope Bingo, both of which were 'meeting the parents'.</p>
            </blockquote>





	my missing puzzle piece

**Author's Note:**

  * For [umlautless](https://archiveofourown.org/users/umlautless/gifts).



> The Big Bang Theory characters do not belong to me and I am making no money off this work of fan fiction.
> 
> Title and handful of lines from Katy Perry's 'Teenage Dream'.
> 
> * * *

It’s an ordinary Sunday morning. These days  _ordinary_ means that Stuart won’t be going into work at all, after Raj worked out for him that he really wasn’t losing any significant amount of business by staying home one day a week. Staying home has a lot of benefits; he can sleep in (in an actual bed!), he doesn’t have to even pretend to be awake until afternoon, and if Raj gets up before him (which is most of the time), he’s usually respectfully quiet.

So, _ordinary_. Stuart gets up at half-past ten, which is early-ish, starts making coffee, and stops by the couch to kiss Raj good morning.

“Did you brush your teeth with a wolverine last night?” his adoring boyfriend enquires, nonetheless pausing the movie that he’s watching for a moment to pull Stuart down into a hug.

“That’s not fair. You’ve probably been up for five hours and brushed your teeth twice.”

“ _Three_ hours, and I have _not_.” Raj exhales in his face; all Stuart can smell is Lucky Charms.

“You eat like a twelve-year-old.” Stuart stands up, waving his hand dramatically in front of his face.

“Oh, and what are _you_ having for breakfast?”

“Depends. Is there any pizza left?”

“You _wouldn’t_.”

Stuart digs through the fridge and finds the neatly cling-wrapped plate. “Breakfast of champions!” he crows triumphantly.

“Seriously?”

“Okay, okay. Lunch of champions.” Stuart’s not much of a breakfast person anyway. He pours his coffee, grabs an apple out of the fruit bowl, and drops into his computer chair. Raj has gone back to watching his movie, but keeps glancing over at him. It gets to the point where Stuart’s about to ask if Raj sees anything green, but then he opens Facebook in a new tab and realizes what Raj is waiting for.

“If you don’t click accept on that request I’ll probably cry,” Raj informs him.

Stuart blows him a kiss and makes their relationship official in the eyes of Facebook.

“Okay... I’m gonna bet five minutes before my parents call me.”

“Isn’t it midnight in India?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

* * *

The Skype chime goes nuts exactly three minutes and forty-five seconds later. Stuart feels like instead of tinkly Bollywood music it should be one of the Harry Potter Howlers, and says so. Raj snorts, then tries to smooth his face into a semblance of seriousness as he opens the laptop.

“Rajesh, is this some sort of joke?” his mother demands.

“No, mummy.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“A while.”

“Three months and eight days,” Stuart says, hovering just out of camera range. Raj flaps a _go away_ hand at him, but Stuart stays. In fact, he scoots onto the couch beside Raj, displacing Cinnamon temporarily, before the dog scrambles onto his lap.

“Is that him?”

“Hi,” Stuart says, leaning his head against Raj’s shoulder.

“Another skinny white boy.” Raj’s mother sighs melodramatically.

“I thought you’d outgrown that phase,” Raj’s father says.

“He still might,” Stuart says. “I’m pretty outgrowable.”

None of the Koothrappalis seem to know how to take that, Raj included, although Stuart could swear he sees a smile flit across Mrs. Koothrappali’s face.

“You know this is a sin,” Dr. Koothrappali says.

“Mmmm, yeah, actually I’m not all that religious, so I’m not really up with the sinning stuff. What I know is that your son makes me very happy, and for some bizarre reason he’s gotten it into his head that I make him happy too.”

“Self-deprecation jar,” Raj murmurs.

“Are you always this disrespectful?” Raj’s father looks ready to blow his stack.

“Well,” Stuart says, ignoring the unsubtle elbow to his ribs, “I try not to be, because it’s bad for business, but I do keep a list of customers who’re rude so I can draw comics of them getting blown up. In this specific case, I’m pretty sure that telling you I’m doing my best to make Raj happy isn’t disrespect so much as it’s just a truth that you happen to dislike.”

“Why, you--”

“Vijay, stop.” Raj’s mom puts a placating hand on his shoulder. “You’re taking this too seriously.” Stuart almost thinks she’s on their side, until she adds, “You know Rajesh has trouble with relationships. This is probably just a phase until he meets the right girl.”

Raj reaches out and closes the laptop lid on the sound of his father saying, “But that’s what you always say!” and pats Stuart’s knee.

“You’re not a phase,” he reassures Stuart.

“I’m not the right girl for you, either.”

“Of course you are.”

Stuart makes an outraged noise, but kisses him anyway.

* * *

They’re still kissing five minutes later when Raj’s laptop makes another incoming call noise at the same time as Stuart’s cell rings.

“Priya,” Raj says.

Stuart flips his phone open. “Annie.”

“Maybe our siblings will be more accepting?” Raj opens the laptop. Stuart gets off the couch to take the call in their bedroom.

“This was one hell of a thing to wake up to,” Annie says by way of greeting.

“Are you shocked that I’m in a relationship?”

“No, I’m pissed that this was how you decided to come out to me, you ass. Did you think I’d really care if you were gay?”

“There is middle ground between straight and gay, you know.” Stuart lies on his stomach on the bed. The pillows smell of warmth and green apples. He can imagine his sister in her breakfast nook, phone to her ear, computer in front of her, textbooks beside it, three thousand miles away.

“Like it matters, you dork. You still could’ve told me.”

“I literally just got up to the Facebook thing this morning. It was his idea.”

“And before that it wasn’t a real relationship? _Please_ , Stuart.”

He doesn’t really have a response to that.

“So tell me about him! How long have you been together, how did you meet, I need to get caught up here,” Annie demands.

Stuart skips the drunk first kiss part, but mentions that they’d been living together and he’d moved out and then back in, and Annie coos over the story like it’s a particularly adorable relationship twist in a TV show. He can hear her clicking her mouse in the background and suspects that she’s stalking his Facebook, in which case it’s going to get interesting when she gets to the photos of Raj dressed as Catwoman.

“He’s pretty,” she says, holding back laughter. Oh, she found them all right. She might be older than him, but they have a degree of sibling telepathy, nonetheless.

“For the record, he doesn’t always dress as a woman.”

“I said nothing.”

“I hope he’s having an easier time talking to his sister than I am,” Stuart says with an exaggerated aggrieved sigh.

“Not if she’s seen these photos, he isn’t.”

The conversation goes on a little longer, but Annie shortly excuses herself; she has studying to do. (She always does.) They exchange I-love-yous and hang up. Stuart goes back out to the living room, where Priya is still talking. Raj looks like a cornered rabbit. Stuart drapes himself over the back of the couch.

“Hello, Stuart. Rajesh, your fetish for skinny white boys is disturbing.”

“Says you,” Raj retorts, not particularly originally.

“Is she mad?” Stuart asks.

“I’m not mad. Or surprised, to be honest. Did you know that the last three profile photos he’s had up have had you in them?” Priya’s not bothering to hold back her smile, unlike her mother.

“I’d noticed.”

“Do you think Mummy and Daddy are ever going to forgive me?” Raj is fretting, picking at a loose thread on his pants.

“Eventually. At least you two won’t disgrace them with half-white babies.”

Raj looks as startled as Stuart feels.

“I’ve sent messages to the others so they’ll leave you alone. Sanjay says you’re a disgrace and Nanda says you have her full support.”

“Great, I have all the girls on my side,” Raj says.

Priya’s smile turns distinctly wicked. “Have you written him any poetry yet, brother dear?”

Raj goes a shade of red Stuart hadn’t previously imagined possible. “Thank you so much for your support.”

Priya just laughs, blows them a kiss, and closes the the connection.

“Poetry?” Stuart immediately asks.

“Don’t ask. But when you inevitably do ask, it’s really hard to find rhymes for ‘possum’.”

Stuart chokes. “You did _not_.”

Raj just picks up a cushion and hides behind it. Stuart’s about to pursue the point, maybe mentioning “blossom” or, at a stretch, “awesome”, but then his phone rings again.

“Your sister again?”

Stuart shakes his head. “My mom.”

“Stuart. Alasdair. Bloom.” Diane sounds like she’s half cheerful and half ready to crawl through the phone line and smack him.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Your sister informs me that you’ve been hiding a relationship from us all.”

“Can we skip to the part where you yell at me?” Stuart flops onto the couch and puts his feet in Raj’s lap. “I’m pretty sure I know what Annie told you. Are you mad about the relationship part, the gay part, or the hiding part?”

“The hiding part. Sweetheart, you know we wouldn’t be mad at you about the rest of it. I just wish you’d told us sooner.”

“How does Dad feel?”

“Your bubbe reminded him that she overlooked it when he didn’t marry a nice Jewish girl. They’re still on the other line arguing about... well, they started with that, but I think they’ve moved on to comparative religion.”

Stuart snickers. Raj starts massaging his feet, digging his thumbs into Stuart’s soles. “He’ll be on the phone for _hours_.”

“Mmmm,” Diane agrees. “I mostly just wish you felt you could have told us earlier, and in person. Did you really think we’d be upset?”

“How _much_ earlier? Because there was this one guy I kissed in high school--”

“Slippery slope,” Raj murmurs, and Stuart digs his toes into Raj’s thigh.

“--and I -- there was some stuff at college, but I didn’t think it was relevant.”

“But this is relevant.”

“This is very relevant,” Stuart says, and Raj gives his calf an affectionate squeeze. Cinnamon, who has clambered up onto Raj’s lap and wedged herself between Stuart’s leg and Raj’s stomach, headbutts Stuart’s knee as if by way of agreement.

“We’re living together, Mom, in case Annie didn’t mention that.”

“She did.”

“Okay.”

“You know what the Bible says about living in sin?”

“No, Mom, and neither do you.”

“That’s right,” Diane says, and Stuart can hear the smile in her voice. “Except in the context of as it applies to deconstructing the major themes in Dante’s _Inferno_.”

“You know, you’d really like Raj. He’s into poetry too.” This earns him a tickled foot and a glare.

“I do wish...” The pause is short but telling. “I wish you’d told us you were gay sooner. I feel like I haven’t shown you that I love you no matter who you love.”

“Mom, I’m not gay. Neither is Raj. We just happened to meet each other somewhere around the middle of the Kinsey scale.”

“Maybe I should sit in on some gender studies lectures.”

“Sure, then you could divorce Dad and go live in a lesbian commune.”

“That’s gross stereotyping, young man, and you know it.” Diane covers the phone for a moment. “Your father wants to talk to you. Love you, possum. Keep in touch. We want to meet your boyfriend.”

Stuart has just enough time to shoot Raj a panicked look and mouth _they want to meet you_ before his dad picks up the phone. “Hi, son.”

“Hey, Dad.”

“I’m not mad at you.” Harry’s voice is flat. “I guess I’m kind of disappointed that the family name’s not going to get passed on.”

“Oh, come on, I’m already 39 and I didn’t have a girlfriend; at what point was I meant to be fathering your grandchildren anyway?”

“The world record is 92; you’re not even halfway there.”

“You never know, Dad. We’ve only been dating for three months.”

“And eight days,” Raj says.

“There’s plenty of time for him to decide I’m not worth the effort.”

“Stop that,” Harry and Raj say in unwitting unison.

Stuart can’t help but smile.

* * *

Stuart thinks they pretty well covered everything with _I’m not mad at you_ , although they do keep talking for a while. It may not be entirely true, not judging by his dad’s tone of voice, but there’s time enough for it to _become_ true. That is, if his own dire words about the two of them breaking up don’t become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

When he hangs up, Raj, who has been whispering something rhythmic at Cinnamon, gets a little louder.

“‘...Before you met me I was all right, but things were kinda heavy...’”

Stuart joins in with, “‘...you brought me to life’,” and assumes that the look on his own face is at _least_ as stupidly happy as Raj’s.

“We’re already in Cali... can we get drunk on the beach?”

“Open container law says no,” Stuart intones.

“Buzzkill. Can we at least get a motel and build a fort out of sheets?”

“That’s silly.” Stuart waits just long enough for Raj to look disappointed before adding, “We can do that _here_.”

Raj lets out a whoop and tumbles Cinnamon off his lap, racing for the bedroom; Stuart follows a little more sedately.

The blanket fort starts out as just a cozy place with direct line of sight on the television, but somewhere during the _Doctor Who_ episode they’re watching Raj wriggles his hand unsubtly into Stuart’s back jeans pocket and murmurs, “The way you turn me on, I can’t sleep,” and it sounds 100% sincere and not like he’s just quoting a Katy Perry song anymore. Stuart goes where Raj’s hand takes him, and goes gladly.

Given all the disappointments of the past, the breakups, even the smaller stuff like (and he feels guilty thinking of it) getting called by the wrong guy’s name, he thinks he’s overdue for a little not ever looking back.


End file.
